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VIRTUAL ETHNICITY: The new digitization of place, body, language, and memory

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Abstract

Ethnicity represents a challenging category of selfhood, even for societies sharing a material lived reality. In cyberspace, ethnicity becomes even more confusing. If ethnic affiliation truly depends upon material phenomena such as body or place, what scope, if any, is there for construction of "real ethnicity" in the deterritorialized disembodied virtual spaces of the Internet? In this paper, I present arguments for the recognition of virtual identities as "real," and I also argue that the material world is, in itself, interwoven with elements of virtuality. I go on to consider the ways in which new virtual communities may attempt establish virtual ethnic identities in cyberspace.
VIRTUAL ETHNICITY:
The new digitization of place, body, language,
and memory
Leah P. Macfadyen
The University of British Columbia
Canada
ABSTRACT: Ethnicity represents a challenging category of selfhood, even for
societies sharing a material lived reality. In cyberspace, ethnicity becomes even
more confusing. If ethnic affiliation truly depends upon material phenomena
such as body or place, what scope, if any, is there for construction of “real
ethnicity” in the deterritorialized disembodied virtual spaces of the Internet? In
this paper, I present arguments for the recognition of virtual identities as “real,”
and I also argue that the material world is, in itself, interwoven with elements of
virtuality. I go on to consider the ways in which new virtual communities may
attempt establish virtual ethnic identities in cyberspace.
Ethnicity and Selfhood in Modern Society
Ethnicity in the Global Village
“Real Ethnicity”
Virtuality, Immateriality, and Ethnicity
The Reality of the Virtual
The Virtuality of the Real
Virtuality, Actuality, and Language
Virtual Ethnicity and Textual Speech Acts
Conclusion
References
Author’s Biographical Sketch
Citing This Source in APA Style
Ethnicity and Selfhood in Modern Society
ethnicity: A highly elastic concept applied to groups who say they share or are
perceived to share some combination of cultural, historical, racial, religious, or
linguistic features. Ethnicity also often implies shared ancestral origins; thus
there is thematic overlap with the older concept of peoples and some modern
notions of race.
(Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences, 2004)
Ethnicity is a much contested term today, as are the related notions of race,
nation, and culture. The meaning of ethnicity is complicated by new
understandings of its origins in the logic of European colonial expansion and of
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its problematic, retroactive, and romanticized invocation in nationalist movements
past and present. To give one example, the collective myth of Poland as an
ethno-religious nation of Slavic Catholics has only very recently been challenged
by what Magdziak-Miszewska (2001) sarcastically describes as the “discovery” of
hundreds of thousands of Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and other minorities
in Poland. Continuing unmasking of such ethnicity myths and the frequent
resistance to such unmasking expose the degree to which ethnic pedigrees have
been constructed to support political goals. Similarly, postcolonial theorists have
demonstrated how European colonizing powers routinely employed artificial
biologized notions of race/ethnicity to construct racial hierarchies that privileged
Europeans – notions that still influence relations of power in contemporary
societies such as the United States today (Bhatia, 2002). The ever-changing
categorizations of ethnicity offered by government census-writers (see, for
example, reporting on census data as collected by Statistics Canada, 1977) are
further evidence of the degree to which “ethnicities” have been instrumentally
constructed (and reconstructed) for sociopolitical ends.
And yet, the desire for and expression of ethnic identification as an indicator of
affiliation or collectivity remain strong. Ethnic labels still denote an almost tribal
form of (literal) identity, as “sameness.” Principally a group construction, ethnicity
can act a resource for self-organization and differentiation of “others” (Zurawski,
2000), and indeed some theorists who are otherwise wary of essentialist
characterizations of ethnicity as a “stable, presocial centre of identity” (Poster,
2001, p. 148) nevertheless recognize the political and social power of organizing
resistance and solidarity movements around notions of racial or ethnic identity.
In the modern West, understanding of ethnicity as a component of identity is
further complicated by perspectives that position identity as primarily a feature of
the individual. Martin (2004) has noted that many Western “self theorists” have
developed notions of selfhood that revolve around what Taylor (1989) and
Cushman (1995) have called the “punctual self” or the “empty self” – a self that is
“cut off from its historical, cultural terrain,” lacking “community, tradition and
shared meaning,” and “removed from the sociocultural meanings and practices
that actually constitute it” (Martin, 2004, p. 25). In spite of the broad Western
cultural attachment to “independent” selfhood (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), ethnic
affiliations seem to persist, evolve, and re-emerge.
Ethnicity, situationally defined via confusing assertions and conflations of shared
culture or shared biology, or both, therefore represents a challenging and
apparently paradoxical category of selfhood, even for societies sharing a material
lived reality.
Ethnicity in the Global Village
A number of theorists have implicated mass media and electronic
communications in the continued transformation of ethnic identities. Marshall
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McLuhan first coined the idea of the “global village” as one in which a new
tribalism was emerging, characterized by both increasing “sameness” and
increasing differentiation at the micro-level (Poster, 2001). Zurawski (2000)
extends this notion to the Internet era and proposes in a quasi-Hegelian dialectic
that the globalized communications of the Internet have impelled a new inter-
penetration of local and global identities. He argues, “’Global’ makes no sense
without a contrasting feeling of ‘local ’” (Chapter 8.1, online), suggesting that
continuing technological development and globalization are actually catalyzing a
kind of reactive identification with local ethnicities. Poster (2001) suggests,
moreover, that these are “postmodern ethnicities,” functionally different from pre-
modern “natural parochialism” (p. 148). Recognizing that globalized Internet
communications actually create new virtual spaces for social life, Poster wonders
whether such spaces may be fostering a new form of planetary culture in which
alternative forms of “virtual ethnicity” are emerging. He asks:
Can there be a form of culture that is not bound to the surface of the globe,
attaching human beings to its particular configurations with the weight of
gravity, inscribing their bodies with its rituals and customs, interpellating their
selves with the force of traditions and political hierarchies? ...is virtual
ethnicity a transgression of essentialism in all its forms, including that of
Western rationalism? ...What is the fate of ethnicity in an age of virtual
presence? (p.150)
Here I explore the possibilities for, and challenges to, construction of authentic
ethnic identities in the virtual worlds of cyberspace. I examine some common
understandings of what constitutes “real” ethnicity, and I survey current
theoretical perspectives on the virtual. Finally, I consider the ways in which new
virtual communities may attempt establish ethnic identities in the virtual spaces of
the Internet.
“Real Ethnicity”
Is there a real or true measure of ethnicity by which virtual ethnicity can be
assessed? Perhaps most consistent with the punctual selves of Western society
are the conceptions of race and ethnicity hypothesized by modern science.
These narratives, vested as they are with the power of “scientific authority,” can
be viewed as more sophisticated incarnations of the centuries-old pseudo-
biological arguments that “blood will out” (Lewontin, 1991). Contemporary
versions tend to anticipate essentialist understandings of racial and ethnic
identities that might be inscribed by the human genetic code. The Human
Genome Project (Human Genome Program, U.S. Department of Energy, 2004) is
perhaps the best-known player in this modern scientific project. In an introductory
essay entitled “To Know Ourselves” (Human Genome Program, U.S. Department
of Energy, 1996), the Human Genome Project website claims: “The sequence of
our genome will ultimately allow us to unlock the secrets of life’s processes, the
biochemical underpinnings of our senses and our memory, our development and
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our aging, our similarities and our differences.” In spite of such grand claims,
however, existing genetic data tend to argue against any possible simple genetic
or biological definition of ethnicity. Attempts to construct genetic characterizations
of racial groups have largely been unsuccessful beyond very broad
generalizations about the frequency of this or that genetic mutation in a large
population. Indeed, current data suggests that people within “ethnic groups” are,
on average, slightly more genetically different from each other than they are
different from individuals in other groups (Bamshad & Olson, 2003). No genes
have been identified that allow unequivocal placement of an individual within an
“ethnic group.” Populations may share some common genes, some degree of
ancestry can be traced using selected markers, but there is no such thing as a
“pure” human population—millennia of trade, travel, and intermarriage (that is, of
social interaction) have seen to that. Nonetheless, it remains common for
populations to conflate inherited characteristics with ethnicity – an interesting
phenomenon that lies beyond the scope of this paper.
Conceptions of ethnicity that rely more heavily on notions of shared culture and
history are illuminated by theorists such as Paul Connerton (1989) and Maurice
Halbwachs (as cited in Connerton, 1989) who explore the ways in which groups
and societies continually construct “collective memory” as part of their shared
identity. Connerton (1989) argues that ritual performance – including ritualized
speech acts – contributes powerfully to the construction of social or collective
memory: the collective habit-memory of a group. Habit-memory is not “historical
memory” (the remembering of a series of historical events), nor is it “cognitive
memory” (the conscious remembering of facts, data, or knowledge). Instead, it is
characterized as an almost unconscious and socially-embedded ability to
reproduce a certain kind of “performance.” Performative ritual itself is a kind of re-
remembering, an important re-enactment of the ritual itself, and not necessarily, if
ever, a re-enactment of a prototypic or historic “event.” It can be observed in
practices ranging from participation in ancient religious rites and ceremonies, to
the conscious construction of new rituals. By way of example of the latter,
Connerton describes the new commemorative practices of the Third Reich,
whose “calendrical liturgy” (p. 41) included ritual speeches, ceremonies
celebrating the joining of the Hitler Youth, and solemn processions or military
parades marking selected political victories. Interestingly, although Connerton’s
social constructivist view is in almost direct opposition to the genetic determinist
perspective, this theorist also stresses the importance of the body. In addition to
the spoken word, Connerton argues that performative meaning is “encoded in set
postures, gestures and movements” (p. 59). The historian Pierre Nora (1989)
makes similar arguments about the construction of “pre-modern” memory,
arguing that identification of the group, or ethnicity, is formed “in gestures and
habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-
knowledge, [and] in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories” (p. 13).
Halbwachs (as cited in Connerton, 1989), meanwhile, discusses the frequency
with which collective identity is tied to physical space: the land. He maintains that
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the “mental spaces” of social memory (and, I would argue, ethnicity) always
“receive support from and refer back to ‘actual material spaces that particular
groups occupy…and that the relative stability of physical places gives’ an illusion
of not changing and of rediscovering the past in the present” (p. 37).
If the material phenomena of land, body, ritual, and speech are, or have been,
critical in the historical construction of ethnic affiliation and collective identity,
what scope, if any, is there for construction and maintenance of ethnicity in the
deterritorialized disembodied textual virtual spaces of the Internet?
Virtuality, Immateriality, and Ethnicity
Concerns about the Internet as a problematic site for construction of authentic
identity and ethnicity persistently revolve around its “virtual” nature, its
immateriality. The places and spaces of the Internet, its landscape and the
beings that occupy it, are constructed and represented almost entirely through
text. Indeed, Poster (2001) characterizes the human culture of online spaces as
“doubly mediated” (p. 152) – not simply mediated by language, but removed a
second time by the conversion of language into digital text.
In cyberspace, bodily markers of ethnicity such as physical attributes and vocal
accent are invisible, and bodily participation in gesture and ritual is impossible.
Zurawski (2000) points out that the physical body is, in effect, “banned from the
Internet” (even though engagement with the communications of cyberspace still
involves the processing of sensory impressions). Anecdotal evidence and a
growing body of research data indicate that the greatest challenge that online
communicators (and especially novice online communicators) report is
construction of what they consider to be a satisfactory or authentic identity in
cyberspace and in interpreting online identities created by others. Routinely, this
challenge is articulated as a problem of disembodiment or deterritorialization.
Rutter & Smith (1998) note, for example, that in their study of a regionally-based
social newsgroup in the UK, communicators showed a real desire to paint
“physical pictures” of themselves in the process of identity construction and
frequently included details of physical attributes and age. In a message posted to
an online forum, another cyberspace communicator writes, “Before you read on
make sure you have a photo…I will not answer to anyone I cannot imagine
physically” (p. 201). Considering deterritorialization, on the other hand, Anderson
(1995) worries about the role that the “Creoles” of new online Middle Eastern
Diaspora communities may play in the destruction of “liberal, humanistic
traditions of Islamic and Arabic high culture” (p. 15). Removed as they are from
their Middle Eastern countries of origin and convened instead in virtual spaces,
their ethnicity and sense of “what is ‘cultural,’” he suggests, are no longer
informed by the institutions, individuals, and authorities of the homeland.
In all, understandings of the virtual are routinely positioned as false, inauthentic,
or in opposition to the real. I suggest, however, that the perception of online
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identities as inauthentic is the product of two great sources of confusion: the
degree to which virtuality is real and the degree to which real processes of
identity construction in daily (material) life involve elements of the virtual.
The Reality of the Virtual
What do we mean by the virtual? In the literature of cyberspace scholarship,
some writers envision the cultural sphere of cyberspace as radically new,
postmodern, or revolutionary (in the Kuhnian sense of shifting paradigms), which
signifies a drastic break with traditional cultural patterns of community, identity,
and communication. Schirmacher (cited by Orvell, 1998) writes, for example,
“Today’s reality points to an immense shift: the emergence of artificial life as the
reality for human beings” (p. 13). In similar vein, Nora (1989) implicates
electronic communications in the disruption and reconfiguring of ethnicity.
Electronic communication, he argues, “has substituted for a memory entwined in
the intimacy of a collective heritage” (p. 7-8) and has introduced a completely
new economy of the identity of the self, in which ethnicity is no longer a
collectively constructed phenomenon, but one that is disseminated,
individualized. It is “as if an inner voice were to tell each Corsican, ‘You must be
Corsican’… [or] to be Jewish is to remember that one is such” (p. 16). Poster
(2001) goes as far as to suggest that Internet technologies have actually brought
into being a "second order of culture, one apart from the synchronous exchange
of symbols and sounds between people in territorial space" (p. 13).
Other writers (Orvell, 1998; Miah, 2000; Žižek cited in Poster, 2001) suggest that
virtual reality is simply a further "sophistication of virtualness that has always
reflected the human, embodied experience" (Orvell, p. 25). Orvell argues that
“debates about postmodernity have evinced a kind of amnesia about the past” (p.
13), and points to continuities between virtual reality and the Romantic
imagination. He offers, for example, a comparison of “the rhetoric of technology
and the rhetoric of Romantic poetry” (p. 13) which both celebrate what Coleridge
called the “esemplastic” or shaping powers of the Romantic imagination. The
poet Emerson, for example, drew upon the language of manufacturing processes
in his 1836 romanticization of the powers of man over nature, writing: “He forges
the subtle and delicate air into wise and melodious words” (p. 14). Oliver
Wendell-Holmes (cited in Orvell) went even further in his 1859 paean to the
stenograph, not simply reporting on its capacity to reproduce reality, but
imagining his physical involvement in it: “The mind feels its way into the very
depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at
us as if they would scratch our eyes out” (p.12). Emerson’s visions of man
forging nature, Poe’s dreams of a perfect timeless landscape, and Wendell-
Holmes’ admiration of and participation in reproductions of reality predate and
prefigure the virtual disembodied worlds of cyberspace, according to Ovell.
Poster (2001), on the other hand, energetically critiques such denials of the
novelty of the virtual – and re-emphasizes the significance of immateriality in the
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virtual, arguing that “what is virtual about the Internet...is the simultaneity without
physical presence, even the physical presence of the voice” (p. 157). Poster
predicts that the cultural consequences of this innovation must be "devastation
for the modern" (p. 13) and argues that virtuality represents an occasion for the
articulation of “new figures of ethnicity” (p. 158). This writer nevertheless sees a
relationship of reciprocity between the real and the virtual, rather than a
fundamental discontinuity. Virtual ethnicity does not simply take on any form, he
clarifies, but always refers back to historically bound forms of ethnicity that can
be traced locally in the cultural and geographical sense. Cyberspace offers a
“new translational logic,” facilitating new perceptions, representations, and
interactions with ethnicity (Zurawski, 2000). “The virtual must be understood as a
historical articulation of the real” and as an articulation that is “fully as actual as
any other such articulation” (Poster, 2001, p. 164).
Perhaps even more meaningful for this present consideration of the authenticity
of the virtual is Pierre Lévy’s (1995) assessment of the distinction between the
real and the virtual. This writer explores two oppositions (taken from
Deleuze,1992) in the Western philosophical tradition: the real/potential
opposition, and the actual/virtual opposition. Whereas traditionally, the potential
has easily become the real, more “invention” has been required for the virtual to
become actual. Lévy argues, then, that “virtual” is not opposed to “real” but to
“actual,” and that Internet technologies are the inventions that are blurring the
actual/virtual distinction. Actuality and virtuality are, in fact, two modes of reality,
and rather than a “disembodying of information”, digitalization should be seen as
a “virtualization” – a shift between modes of reality (cited in Poster, 2001, p. 164).
What becomes clear from this survey of perspectives on the virtual, in spite of
their supposed opposition, is the degree to which the virtual is confirmed as a
new form of reality. Whether we accept Poster’s postmodern analysis of virtuality
as a translation of actuality, Orvell’s (1998) assessment of cyberspace virtual
reality as continuous with the Romantic imagination, or the optimistic analysis of
Lévy (2001), who characterizes the Internet as “a technical materialization of
modern ideals,” it becomes possible to reject any simple characterization of the
virtual as a “false instantiation of the real” (Poster, 2001, p. 164).
The Virtuality of the Real
Conversely, in assessing the authenticity of virtual ethnicity, it is important to
critically examine the assumed reality of the material elements upon which
authentic or historical ethnicity depends: land, body, and speech. I want to
suggest here that to a large extent we already experience these tools of ethnicity
construction as virtual.
Both in theoretical accounts of construction of collective identities (Connerton,
1989), as discussed, and in popular pseudo-scientific conceptions of authentic
ethnic identity, the body looms large. But can we rely on the body as always non-
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virtual, persistently present? In his work The Absent Body, Leder (1990) surveys
a number of theoretical perspectives that reveal the ways in which our bodies are
frequently absent in daily life, “whether forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, or
obscured” (p. 219). On the one hand, argues Leder, human experience is
incarnated: we experience the world through our senses, relate to others via
gaze, touch, speech, emotions. On the other hand, and paradoxically, the body is
characterized by absence – “one’s own body is rarely the thematic object of
experience” (p. 1) – whether one is reading a book or engaged in a fiercely
physical sport. Leder explores at length the body’s tendency to disappear from
awareness and action: the body at times projects outside itself into the world (as
with communication technologies); at times it recedes from conscious perception
and control. Sometimes the body simply “moves off to the side”; “at any time,
parts of the surface body are left unused or rendered subsidiary, placed in a
background disappearance. It has, in fact, a tendency towards self-concealment”
(p. 69). Leder goes as far as to observe that Western (material) society is typified
by a “disembodied’ style of life, in which shelters protect us from engagement
with the outside world, prosperity alleviates physical need and distress, machines
divest us of physical work, and technologies allow us to transcend our natural
limits. Leder’s perceptive assessment of the absence of the body from much of
everyday life must prompt us to reconsider our continual referencing of “real”
bodies in determination of ethnic identities.
An ingrained attachment to or affiliation with material spaces and physical places
is also frequently invoked as an indicator of ethnicity. Must such places be
materially experienced by the individual whose ethnicity refers to it? In his classic
text Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that most national
and ethnic communities are imagined because members "will never know most
of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of each
lives the image of their communion" (p.6). Anderson suggests that print-
capitalism and the resulting broad dissemination of ideas and shared stories in
vernacular languages perform a culture-unifying or collectivizing function. Print,
he argues, allows the development of “new ideas of simultaneity,” new “ways of
linking fraternity.” and the creation of ideas of “imagined community” (p. 35). I
suggest that these same processes may also contribute to a collective imagining
of material spaces. Print capitalism initiated – and later media developments
have continued – the production of collective imaginings of shared physical
places that may never have been visited in “actuality.” Which of us has seen
Nunavut or traveled to the coast of Labrador? Yet we carry within us a shared
sense of “our” place named Canada. As an interesting example, Poster (2001)
points to land-affiliated ethnicities, such as Jewishness, that have survived in the
absence of “a grounded space.” If, as Connerton (1989) implies, ethnicity truly
involves remembering (habit-memory), I nevertheless suggest that memory is
continually dissociated from material place, and often occurs instead via what
Poster calls “nonspatial mediations” (p.167) that offer virtual experiences of
space/place.
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In sum, then, I have first presented arguments for the recognition of virtual
spaces and identities as real, and now I propose that the material world in which
we lay such store for authenticity is, in itself, interwoven with elements of
virtuality. Indeed, Orvell goes as far as to suggest that the distinctive feature of
contemporary (Western) culture is “precisely its inauthenticity,” in the sense that
“everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print
or on film” (p. 22). We have, says Orvell, moved beyond “the pleasure of
possessing the facsimile that puts us as close to the real as we can come,” and
instead “we have made a virtue of virtuality” (p. 22). In its endless series of
representations of representations, Orvell argues that the United States itself has
become a Virtual Culture, one in which the representation is craved over the
reality. The line between the virtual and the real is hopelessly blurred, I suggest,
with the one interpenetrating the other and existence in cyberspace representing
no real signifier of authenticity.
Virtuality, Actuality, and Language
Some may argue, however, that inasmuch as the virtual spaces of cyberspace
exist as places built only from text they can never be considered to be actual, but
are only mediated, forever distanced from reality by “the symbolic coding [that]
intercedes between individual consciousness and experience” (Poster, 2001, p.
152). Does the linguistic-textual nature of the virtual world finally relegate it to the
category of “less-than-real”?
As early as 1878 Nietzsche offered an answer to this concern, theorizing that
language itself is a second or ‘virtual’ world that stands against and outside the
“real.” He argued that language is “separate from the world” and “master of it” (as
cited in Poster, 2001, p. 152). Today, “decades after the linguistic turn, this
position may be accepted without argument” affirms Poster (p. 153). In other
words, and in spite of our attachment to the material, we are forced to
acknowledge that all our experiences, our relation to the world, and our
constructions of ethnicity and identity – whether virtual or material – are, in some
sense, constructed by language.
As a subset of language, virtual worlds are constructed of written discourse, or
text, not “speech,” and a number of theorists (Ricoeur, 1981; Ong, 1977;
McLuhan, 1964) have theorized that in itself the shift from speech to writing/print
has contributed to a further “alienation within the human lifeworld” (Ong, p. 17).
Ricoeur argues that text, as an instance of written discourse, involves four forms
of what he calls “distanciation” that differentiate it from speech. Firstly, in text the
interplay between saying and meaning is broken. Second, text allows the
intentions of the speaking subject and the meaning of what is said – dimensions
of meaning that overlap in speech – to drift apart. Third, in text the specificity of
addressivity is lost, and words are shared with an unknown audience. And lastly,
while the shared circumstances of speech (with speaker and listener
participating) provide some degree of “referential specificity,” these shared
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circumstances are lost when discourse becomes textualized (Thompson, 1998).
Ricoeur’s analysis suggests that it is only the speech manifestation of language –
another instantiation of materiality – that permits the true collectivization of and
sharing in meaning that is required for construction of ethnicity, as proposed by
theorists such as Connerton (1989). Poster (2001) even characterizes speech as
the final strands of materiality that are lost in the emergence of virtual cultures.
I would like to suggest, however, that the language of virtual worlds should no
longer be viewed simply as text. I concur with Lévy’s (2001) McLuhanesque
proposition that while the original development of writing “wrenched messages
out of context, separated them from the point of origin” (p. 98), the nature of
cyberspaces reattaches the meaning of text messages to context. While print
contributed to the universalization of thought – the collectivization of imagination
and meaning that Anderson (1991) has described – it also ensured that meaning
remained unchanged by interpretation or translation. The text-language of
cyberspace, by contrast, resists any closure of interpretation, any universal fixity
of meaning, because in cyberspace texts are no longer “fixed.” In the virtual
world, any text can be fragmented, reassembled, and interconnected with other
text. This plasticity is, Lévy (2001) suggests, reviving “ancient and folkloric
traditions of games and rituals – [organizing] our participation in events rather
than spectacles” (p. 285) – writing/creating rather than reading/receiving. Though
appearing as print, the writing of the virtual world is text that is becoming speech.
Virtual Ethnicity and Textual Speech Acts
I have suggested, then, that the virtual and the real (or the actual) are not clearly
demarcated, as some would have us believe, but are intimately interwoven. The
real is peppered with elements of virtuality; the virtual is no less real for lack of
materiality. Both worlds are mediated by language: speech, text, text-becoming-
speech. What are the implications of these realizations for the construction and
maintenance of identity and ethnicity in the virtual spaces of the Internet? Should
we simply expect to find digital equivalents of materially-referent ethnic identity
construction presented in text? Or will the new linguistic and communicative
forms of cyberspace permit alternate constructions of ethnicity (that are no less
“real”)?
Paul Ricoeur’s ideas from his 1992 work Oneself as Another seem useful, here.
First, Ricoeur offers an analysis of the self as divided in a way that usefully
reflects that material/virtual dilemma of virtual ethnicity. We constantly conflate
two distinct notions of identity, says Ricoeur. Idem-identity rests in the physical,
and carries notions of identity as “sameness.” It does not, however, give any
answer to the crucial question of identity, "Who am I?" This depends, rather, on
Ipse-identity, better characterized as “selfhood” – a form of identity that is not
dependent on something permanent for its existence.
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Next, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of selfhood (Ipse-identity) as created
through what he calls an attestation (belief) of truth or certainty about self.
Attestation is a testimony – a testimony that Ricoeur sees as performed through
repeated (ritualized) “speech acts” by the individual self, an assurance that the
self believes in the truth or validity of something, the assurance of being oneself
acting and suffering. This assurance remains the ultimate recourse against all
suspicion, says Ricoeur. Even if it is always in some sense received from
another, it still remains self-attestation (Vessey, 2002). In the case of identity,
such ritual attestation not only offers the possibility of construction of a dynamic
and narrative self, it defines a character or individual as being an agent of action:
a constructive act. As Ong (1977) affirms, “the spoken word is always an
event…an action…an ongoing part of ongoing existence” (p. 21).
With particular relevance for ethnicity, I propose that the ritual speech acts of
individual attestation in the material world are the sub-elements of group
ritualized performance in the construction of collective identity of which
Connerton (1989) speaks. Collective attestation facilitates the construction of
identities that rest on affiliation, such as ethnicity. In the virtual world of the
Internet, where “speech acts” are presented through text-as-speech, I predict that
we will increasingly find new evidence of individual and group ritual “text acts”
through which individuals agentically and dynamically attest to their ethnicity.
Poster wonders whether “the form in which language is exchanged…affects the
cultural construction of the world and subject positions within it,” not in a
technologically deterministic sense, but in the sense that “technical forms do
open possibilities and do contain constraints” (2001, p. 153). Exploring the
possible new forms of attestation made possible by text-speech-technology of
virtual spaces will begin to illuminate the new rituals of virtuality that we use to
define ourselves.
Conclusion
At last, then, it becomes clear that the challenges to, and possibilities for,
ethnicity in cyberspace are not induced by any problem of the virtual, but simply
by the complex ways in which “technologies of symbolization are positioned in
complex relations to other social practices [and] are mutually transforming”
(Poster, 2001, p. 154).
The paradigm shift initiated by Internet technologies is not, I suggest, a new
virtuality, but is instead the transformation of text into a form of speech, re-
associated with individual and context, that makes it available as a tool for
individual and group attestation of identity and ethnicity. I disagree with Poster
when he claims that online interaction “would tend to dissolve ethnicities to the
extent that they are based…on presence in space and on ancient, common
rituals” (p. 160). On the contrary, I suspect that existing ethnicities will be
presented in new ways in digital worlds, but will increasingly come to co-exist
© 2006 Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
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seamlessly with new forms of ethnicity in a spectrum of ethnicities that are more,
or less, virtual.
As an example of the former, I offer here a personal introduction posted to the
discussion forum of a multicultural online course:
My name is Gad Gidon, my traditional name inherited from my grandfather is
T’musta7. I am from Mount Currie also known as the Lil’wat Nations within the
tribal territories of the St’at’imc Nation…a language grouping of Eleven First
Nations Communities.
(Chase, Macfadyen, Reeder, & Roche, 2002)
Embedded in the virtual, this writer makes reference to material phenomena that
we can nonetheless recognize as virtual or imagined to some degree: familial
inheritance (always contestable), physical place (which of us will ever see Mount
Currie?), the real-but-imagined belonging to a defined ethnic community, and the
reference to a common group language (which may in reality be spoken by very
few members).
The so-called technologies of symbolization may also permit the construction of
new forms of ethnicity through digitally-mediated attestation of or performance of
ethnicities that rely on new forms of “imagined materiality”: attachment to digital
virtual spaces, use of invented languages and codes, membership in non-
material imagined communities. Lévy’s (2001a) notion of the Internet as
“collective intelligence” may offer a more accurate vision of the production of new
virtual ethnicities because it situates the individual in a virtual object that is
understood to be unfinished, and contingent. The Internet, says Lévy, offers an
imaginary in which "identity [and thus ethnicity] is a temporary fluid link to a
process of creation," and a subject position that is “never before” rather than
“always already” (p. 170).
Perhaps the greatest challenge of digital virtual reality for us moderns, then, is
that it forces us to give up our rather suspect reliance on the material as proof of
authentic ethnicity. Instead, we are forced to recognize and acknowledge the
great degree to which our identities are always already constructed as dynamic
narratives through speech, performance, and the laying down of habit-memory.
As Žižek argues, experience of the virtual forces us to reflexively consider reality
and “retroactively enables us to discover to what extent our self has always been
virtual” (as cited in Poster, 2001, p. 155).
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Dr. Leah P. Macfadyen is a Research Associate in Skylight (the Science Centre for Learning and
Teaching) within the Faculty of Science at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
Canada. Before joining the Faculty of Science, Dr. Macfadyen undertook research and teaching
projects for the UBC Centre for Intercultural Communication and UBC Distance Education &
Technology. (Contact this author at
leah.macfadyen@ubc.ca; contact the editors of EMME at
emme@eastern.edu.)
Recommended Citation in the APA Style:
Macfayden, L. (2006). Virtual Ethnicity: The new digitization of place, body, language, and
memory. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, 8(1). Retrieved your access month date,
year, from
http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2006spring/macfadyen.pdf
(Please note that in order to comply with APA style citations of online documents
regarding page numbers, only the PDF versions of EMME article, which are paginated,
should be cited.)
© 2006 Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
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